1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an improved data processing system and, in particular, to a method and apparatus for multicomputer data transferring and program execution.
2. Description of Related Art
The widespread adoption of Internet-related and Web-related technology has enabled the growth of a global network of interconnected computers that are physically supported by many thousands of organizations and businesses and many millions of individuals. Recently, enterprises have exerted effort to organize the computational capacity of many computers into a grid, which is a logical organization of many computers for providing a collective sharing of computational capacity and datastore capacity while maintaining local autonomous control over individual computers.
For example, many enterprises are cooperating within the Global Grid Forum™, which is supported by GGF, Inc., to develop community-driven standards for grid computing. The Globus Project™ is one effort that has been supported by government agencies, corporations, and universities to develop grid-related technologies, which has resulted in the development of the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA), which is an initiative for incorporating grid concepts within a service-oriented framework based on Web services. The Globus Toolkit® is an implementation of the Open Grid Services Architecture that provides software programming tools for developing grid-enabled applications, and the Java® Community Grid (CoG) Kit is the portion of the Globus Toolkit® that provides access to grid services through a Java® framework.
Although the Java® CoG Kit supports a Java® application in accessing grid services, the Java® CoG Kit does not incorporate the computational characteristics of a grid into a Java® virtual machine (JVM). Therefore, it would be advantageous to have a method, a system, an apparatus, and/or a computer program product that incorporates computational characteristics of a grid within a virtual machine. It would be particularly advantageous to perform object management within a virtual machine such that the virtual machine may be implemented within a dynamically changing, grid computing environment.